September 23, 2024: The US Department of Energy is backing studies by the newly-formed Aqueous Battery Consortium, which aims to overcome the limitations of a battery using water as its electrolyte.

The DOE said on September 3 the consortium, led by Stanford University and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), could receive up to $62.5 million over five years.

Researchers aim to develop a battery that will be more environmentally safe and have a higher energy density than lead acid batteries and cost one-tenth that of present day lithium ion batteries.

The group plans to keep costs for this future technology low by using “cheaper raw materials, simpler electronics, and new, efficient manufacturing techniques”. The technology to be developed is also expected to be safer, and to create batteries that charge and discharge quickly.

Yi Cui, a Stanford professor of materials science and engineering, of energy science and engineering, and of photon science at SLAC, said the project will undertake the grand challenge of electrochemical energy storage in a world dependent on intermittent solar and wind power.

Cui said a huge amount of stationary energy storage will be needed to reduce net global greenhouse gas emissions to zero — and water is the only realistic solvent available at the quantity and cost needed for such batteries.

“How do we control charge transfer between solids and water from the molecular to the device scale and achieve reversibility with an efficiency of nearly 100%? We don’t know the solutions to those hard problems, but with the DOE’s support we intend to find out.”

The consortium will be administered by Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy. The team consists of 31 leading battery scientists, engineers, and physicists from 12 universities in North America, as well as from SLAC, the US Army Research Lab and the US Naval Research Lab.